Sample Lync Server Archiving Report Available

Sample Lync Server Archiving Report Available

Update 11/26/13 - I have release an updated version of the reports. This version of the reports includes a Dashboard. See the changelog below for more details on what's new.

The Sample Lync Server Archiving Report is an update to the popular Sample OCS Archiving Report, however this report has been completely redesigned based on feedback from the community. We've expanded the report to include more information from the archiving database and we've changed the layout of the report to make the information easy to consume.

Features

Dashboard report to provide an overview about information in the archiving database

View detailed information about P2P IM conversations and conferences

Search for IMs and Conferences by SIP address and date

Select from multiple Lync Server Archiving databases to search against

Web-based SSRS reports can be used by anyone with rights and a web browser

The reports have been tested against Lync Server 2010 and Lync Server 2013 using SQL Reporting Services 2012. You will need to have a functioning SQL Reporting Services server before trying to deploy this report.

Installing the Reports

Download the latest version of the Sample Lync Server Archiving Report

Extract the zip file

Open Report Manager – http(s)://<SRS Server>/Reports

Click on New Folder

Give the folder a name – i.e. LyncArchivingReport

Click OK

Click on the folder you just created

Click on Upload File

Browse to the location where you extracted the LyncArchivingReport zip file and select Search.rdl

Click OK to upload the report

Repeat Steps 9 and 10 for the rest of the reports

(Optional) - To remove the reports from the default view, since you can't directly access them:

Go to the properties of the Conference Details Report by clicking on the drop-down and selecting Manage

Click on Hide in tile view

Click Apply

Go back to the LyncArchivingReport folder and repeat for the Conversation Details Report

To configure the report to use your SQL Server(s), you will need to open the Search report in SQL Server Report Builder

Click on the drop-down for the Search report and select Edit in Report Builder

If this is the first time you've used Report Builder on this computer, select Run when the Do you want to run this application? prompt appears

In SQL Server Report Builder, in the Report Data section, expand Parameters and double-click on SqlConnectionString

This is because they don't have access to run the DbGetVersion2 stored procedure. You will need to perform the following additional steps to grant access:

In SQL Server Management Studio, add the user or group that contains the users you want to be able to run the Dashboard report in the Security > Users folder under the LcsLog database. Right-click on the user and select Properties. Make sure that the Securables page is displayed:

Click on the Search button:

Make sure that Specific objects is selected and click OK. Click on the Object Types button:

Select Stored procedures and click OK. Click on the Browse button:

Select [dbo].DbGetVersion2] and click OK:

Click OK:

Select the Grant check box for the Execute permission. Click OK.

The reports are now ready to be used.

Using the Reports

Dashboard

Note: You may need to click on the image above in order to read the text.

The Dashboard report shows you an overview about information contained in the archiving database. You can see information about the SQL Server that hosts the archiving database, as well as, information about the archiving database itself. The number of instant messages and conferences are shown for the time period selected as well as top users for instant messages and conferences.

Search

Note: You may need to click on the image above in order to read the text.

The Search report is the main report that you will use. As it's name implies, this is the report that you will use to generate your queries against the archiving database. The report requires a couple pieces of data, namely the SIP addresses of the user's that you want to search against and the date range of the search. If you want to search every user or if you only want to search for any communications to/from a single user, use the NULL option. This essentially means any user. You can also pick the SQL Server you want to run the query against.

The results are broken up into two sections, Instant Messages and Conferences. Clicking on the link will drill down into more information for that conversation.

Conversation Details Report

Note: You may need to click on the image above in order to read the text.

Drilling down into an instant message conversation will display something similar to above. You can see when and who sent the initial message, as well as the client versions of the users, and a transcript of the conversation.

Conference Details Report

Note: You may need to click on the image above in order to read the text.

Drilling down into a conference shows you a lot of information gathered by the Archiving Server role. You can expand each section to take a look at the data that was captured.

Please leave any questions/comments/feedback in the comments section below.

Meeting Data Location for Lync Server 2010 conferences is not a valid link.

All times are displayed in UTC. Trying to convert the times to local time zones automatically isn't possible.

IM conversations that contain Unicode characters may not be displayed correctly. SSRS doesn't natively have a way to parse RTF text. If the conversation is stored in the archiving database in RTF, some non-Latin characters may be stored as Unicode. This means that the report will not display those IM messages correctly.

That is something that we're looking at trying to allow, but with DST, it's a little more complicated than it seems, so I want to make sure that we implement something that works and is useful. Thanks for the feedback!

Moto

9 Oct 2013 1:27 PM

@dodeitte

Good Day, thank you very much for reports!!!!

In one of the first posts Michael was asking about national (cyrillic simbols), have you some solution?

when i am watching report of conversation i see something like this (instead of message):

Currently the report handles RTF text by using a RegEx to strip all the formatting tags and just display the text. However, in your case, and some others, the text is encoded in Unicode and just stripping the tags won't work. SSRS currently has pretty limited support for handling RTF text, so I'm still working on options.

QL

6 Nov 2013 4:08 PM

Great Report Doug, Making some customers very happy!

One question regarding configuring the report with a Lync SQL Mirror. The 2 instances running our SQL Mirror each have SSRS installed. I followed your instructions from the other article regarding setting the Failover Partner in SSRS for the Monitoring Report Pack (which works fine with the mirror).

I followed the steps you have on the Primary Instance for the Archiving reports and they worked as well. I added the reports to the mirror instance and wasn't sure what to put in for the servername . I tried the name of the mirror then the name of the primary and neither worked. For now, we are just going to plan on running the report off the Primary when the Primary is the principal partition in the pair but it would be nice to get the report to run when we are on the mirror.